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Government Funds Secret Sustainable Computing
SEWilco writes "OSDN's NewsForge reports that Carnegie Mellon University has started a Sustainable Computing Consortium to improve the quality and security of software.
The only news release is that NASA gave CMU $23 million to help create dependable software.
SCC members get an internal-use license for SCC software. So taxpayers are paying millions to create proprietary software, and companies get access for a few thousand dollars.
(There is some blurring between CMU's SCC and CMU's High Dependability Computing Consortium, although HDCC's web site has been idle for a year.)"
Here they are telling us they need money, yet the have $23 million to give away?
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Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish. - Euripides
Non-classified government funded software should be Free for public use, I guess is the point here. Are there any ongoing lobbying efforts to this effect?
I don't understand the title of this article. What's "secret" about this?
Propriatary, yes, and perhaps it's wrong for the gov. to turn our tax money into a Microsoft product (but of course, the government gives billions in tax rebates, subsidised loans, etc. to EVERY american business), but there is definitly nothing secret about this.
Stop the FUD!
CMU's computer science department is top-notch. Their Software Engineering Institute is the home of software process, which has the goal of turning computer programming into an engineering discipline (e.g. measurable, repeatable) instead of an art (e.g. "wow, great hack").
They also have one of the best robotics departments, with a heavy emphasis on industrial robotics applications, embedded systems, etc. (as opposed to MIT's Rodney Brook's COG behavior work).
In fact, CMU as a whole has a very heavy slant towards Industrial Application. Their business school turns out poor managers, but good Operations Researchers. The Humanities Department is known for its Social Policy Theory.
Give CMU millions and you get back real, usable results.
Also, it's in Pittsburgh.. ya know, Da 'Burgh. Stillers!
On the downside, the weather there sucks.
>>So taxpayers are paying millions to create proprietary software, and companies get access for a few thousand dollars.
I hope this is not trollish, but there has been a lot of this going around for quite some time; indeed, it's how the world works in the domestic USA. Pharmaceutical (sp?) funding gets Gov. grants for the coarse, laborious, and often empty research, and then hands over any promising results for free to Merck and others for development into actual drugs. Universities do lots of basic research that then, when promising, can be used by manufacturers, and if classified will even be denied to you and I.
Now you can argue that these results help fuel the economy, but you can also argue that the marketplace should be charging for the information developed at the expense of the funders.
Hey, it's only our money. What's on TV?
If the software is written using public funds (i.e. my tax dollars are paying for this), then the resulting software should be publically available. Either under a GPL type license or under a BSD sytle license (with a BSD license, then even companies could incorporate the publically funded technology into their products to sell, sorta giving them something back for their tax dollars). Either way, if we paid [taxes] for it, then it should be available to us.
Maybe we could get a bill passed that states all software not written for national security that is paid for by taxes should be open to the tax payers. Just a thought.
Condor is a software system being developed as part of a research project at an university, just like thousands of others.
The CMU thingy is a consortium, i.e. an agreement for a whole bunch of people/entities to work together. Assumably, they will organize conferences and workshops, hand out grant money, to encourage work in this area.
The two are entierly different.
To rehash what appears to be a popular theme around these parts... I just don't see how one can excuse the use of public money for projects that only select private parties can benifit from. Granted, this project is likely to benifit NASA in that it could help them provide better mission-critical systems for the space station, future spacecraft, and so on... but I still feel that taxpayers should not be made to pay to help develop a product that targets them as consumers, a project with a licensing scheme that would make it anything but available to the general taxpaying public.
These are, perhaps, the kinds of things that we need better government accounting regulations to keep track of.
stuff from the FSF is still around in a few decades, and their stuff has been completely rewritten 100 times?
Maybe then they'll realize what sustainable means...
nahh....
This is left as an exercise for the reader.
So NASA needs some Sustainable Computing and they spent $23million of their budget to get it. Where is the problem here?
Is this trying to imply that all NASA software should be free?
Hmmm, didn't Microsoft go on record that they supported taxpayer funded research being freely available provided it would not be encumbered by the GPL?
Or would that just have been a divide and conquer approach to make sure the free software camps keep fighting each other rather than joining forces?
I personally shudder at the thought that taxpayer money should go to subsidizing software hoarding (and that's any taxpayer money, not just US).
Oh well. This won't impact open software one way of the other until patents get thrown into the mix. Closed source has never hurt open source.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
Hey, it's NASA sponsored, remember?
Paperwork is probably the number one ingredient.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
I just don't see how one can excuse the use of public money for projects that only select private parties can benifit from.
Any private party can benefit from it, all they have to do is pay $25,000/year. Or were you talking about the SCC as the select private party? Because I would assume they're going to spend all the money they receive from the government and members on the research.
I'm not sure if the SCC is a non-profit, but it certainly should be. If not them maybe you have a point.
The parent will probably be modded "Funny", but there is a good source for debate here...
Obviously, there are boundaries to what the public should expect back from its tax dollars at work.
The public would not take kindly to minuteman design plans to be revealed under the Freedom of Information Act (in fact, that act is pretty specific in this respect, but since it was intended to repair the situation where government officials were hiding information the public should have access to, a lot of thought went into defining those boundaries; unlike the more general laws that deal with public use of government sponsored activities).
It would probably be a good thing if the House looked into this whole thing. Yeah, I know. I'll be dressing up warmly just in case hell freezes over.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
like Lycos.com ?
cpeterso
We aim to maintain a level of continuity in the quality of reliable computing consortiums in existance today. Gone are the days of having uninformed, outdated consortiums changing their names to reappear in the spotlight. The Sustainable Reliable Computing Consortium Initiative will serve as a watchdog group for reliable computing consortiums of various types.
Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
That is currently reviewing Carnegie Mellon's restricted research policy. I'll bring this up. Just so that you all know, this research must be with one of CMU's "semi-autonomous units," and no students are participating in the research, otherwise it could not have cleared our Provost. At any rate, this is interesting information to have.
Ceci n'est pas un post
But since the US passed the Bayh-Dole act, government funded agencies are free to privatise their discoveries for profit - and in practice, there is a lot of pressure to play the commercialisation game.
So perhaps the right strategy to lobby for is to GPLed the code, with the alternative of paying for a proprietary license, as Trolltech, for example, does with Qt.
This also has the nice property that it debunks all of Microsoft's arguments against the GPL, which claim that the license prevents the transfer of publicly funded technology to the private sector.
Fixing copyright
If you read the actual press release you will get the impression that It's not really a software Development Project at all, its more of an effort to FIGURE OUT the best ways to build Software and Computers for Sustainability.
It will probably end up being a LAB or even a School, at which they work on Sustainability issues. My guess would be that the results/findings will be widely presented and published. I think that resulting SW tools may or may not end up being open-sourced.
The prevailing theme I read in other postings is that people think that anything the Gov't funds, should be open. That idea doesn't hold any water anyplace. Weapons the gov't funds the development of are not open. And I don't want them to be. I don't want the software that runs a weapon to be open either. You can't go buy a missile, and you can't go download the code that runs in a missile, and I like it that way.
Furthermore, the "Open-Source way" kind of breaks down when it comes to obscure problems that only specific groups ( like governments ) need to solve. People need to have something that excites them and interests them about working on some project. At least they need the hardware that it will run on.
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"-B.Franklin
Lycos...and CMU uses Google for their site search. Good to see they're avoiding NIH problems.
It really ticks me off when I see people saying that publicly funded code should GPLed.
That is *less* free. The GPL (or any license) *restricts* the use of the code.
Public Domain is the only way to go.
Public domain meaning that anyone and any company can do what ever they want with the code,
including the freedom to not tell anyone that they are using it!
The modifications they make are their own, and they can sell, license, GPL those modifications as they wish.
However, they can't patent the original code, since there is prior art (the Public Domain code).
"You have the option of insanity. I do not. And that makes me crazy!" - Brian to Angela, My So-Called Life
I agree that the software should be used in a way that serves our best interest. But that doesn't mean that open sourcing is necessarily the best way to do that. A lot of government software is specialized enough that few people can use it. The options the gov has in that case:
- Keep it to yourself. Has the big advantage that you've got no extra costs. The taxpayer gets the benefit for which this software was written.
- Open source the code. This means extra expenses to get it in shape by removing proprietary stuff from other companies, making it less dependant on the specific environment in which the government organisation runs it, making sure there are no references to Roswell and other secret stuff, etc. Those extra costs will bring no benefit to 99.9% of the taxpayers.
- Sell the code if there is interest. This pays for new projects and thus benefits the taxpayer.
I'm not convinced that the second option is always the best.Second, the widespread belief among open source types like myself is that the more eyes that are on the code, the more likely the vulnerabilities will be discovered and ultimately patched.
I'm sure that thousands of developers will eyeball the code (written in Ada or another relatively obscure language) to control the space shuttle's robot arm. Everyone will surely test the code on their own space shuttle. There is a big difference between Linux and a piece of highly specialized software. You can't expect much from these code reviews. Especially since Nasa-software is already extensively reviewed by experts.
The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi
You pay Nasa for exploring space and to boldy go where no one has gone before. You don't pay them to provide you with the software they use to achieve this goal (software for controlling rockets, shuttles and other stuff that I'm sure you don't have). Selling the software to private parties means that they have more money available to achieve their primary goal. This does benefit the taxpayer.
Or perhaps you would rather pay more taxes because Nasa can't sell their software? In return you'd get all the software to control your own space shuttle for free. Wouldn't that be great?
The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi
...and you'd also get all the software infrastructure they write to sustain their extremely-high-reliability software development practices. That might be well worth the cash.
I agree that government research should be free for all if possible and sensible (making money on patents might be a good choice in a cases where the knowledge is only advantageous to a select few). It seems that I misread your post as being about software (being an implementation of the knowledge that should be open). Please accept my apologies.
The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi